American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic Sta ...

the conventional constraints of chronological time. In both works, the postmodern is defined against the modern in terms of violations of conventional arrangements of space and time.

The reason for these violations is the recognition in a poststructuralist world that to make meaning one must have a center, a fixed place from which to view the action. But if the assumption of that fixed place is ideological, if it is based more on gender, class, race, and other concerns that masquerade as objectivity, then the discoveries made from such a perspective are invalid. Postmodern drama attempts to give its audience a place to stand, and often invokes realistic conventions to establish a starting point or perspective against which the rest of the play will react. The purpose is to destabilize the very notion of a fixed or objective perspective.

The best example of this is Mamet’s Oleanna, which offers a clear and objective view of a student’s visit to her professor’s office in the seemingly unremarkable first act. Then in the second act, the student has already brought charges of sexual harassment against the professor based on what was seen in the first act. When I saw Mamet’s production, I assumed after the first act that this play had none of the fireworks it was reputed to have. In the second act, however, I came to realize that what I thought I’d seen in the first was a mistaken impression, because I’d accepted the perspective of the male teacher, which increasingly seemed illegitimate. Even more significantly, the audience was clearly divided in its response to the play, so that one finally realized that the significance of the play is not in which side is right and which wrong, but rather how people of similar background can view the same play from such opposing viewpoints. This was demonstrated when Mamet took the production to Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center where a large blackboard was placed out in the lobby after each performance with ushers taking votes on who was right. The very split in voting shows that people of good will can view the same phenomena totally differently.

The continual quest of the postmodern dramatist, then, is to find a way to open the play giving the audience the illusion of objectivity, and then subvert that position in order to bring the audience to recognize the